Shoshenq I Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Morkot, R. & James, P., 2015. “Dead-reckoning the Start of the 22nd Dynasty: from Shoshenq V back to Shoshenq I”, in P. James & P. van der Veen (eds), Solomon and Shishak: Current Perspectives from Archaeology, Epigraphy, History and Chronology. Proceedings of the Third BICANE Colloquium held at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge 26-27 March, 2011 (BAR International Series 2732). Oxford: Archaeopress, pp. 20-41. Readable online at https://www.centuries.co.uk/replies.htm
Kenneth Kitchen and other Egyptologists have claimed that a 10th-century BC date for Shoshenq I (founder of the 22nd Dynasty) can be arrived at not only from a philological identification with the biblical Shishak, but from chronological ‘dead-reckoning’ backwards through the Third Intermediate Period. One problem here is: where is the fixed point from which one begins retrocalculation? Kitchen himself counts backwards from his ‘Osorkon IV’, whom he identifies with the like-named king from the Piye Stela and the Shilkanni mentioned in Assyrian records in 716 BC. Yet there is no firm evidence that such an Osorkon ‘IV’ ever existed, while there is a mounting case for a return to the position of earlier Egyptologists that the king in question was the well-attested Osorkon III, presently dated to the first quarter of the 8th century BC. Equating him with the Osorkon of Piye would require lowering the dates of Osorkon III (and the last incumbents of the 22nd Dynasty) by some 40-50 years – a position strongly supported by archaeological, art-historical and genealogical evidence. Using these later dates, dead-reckoning backwards through the Dynasty (using the Pasenhor genealogy, Apis bull records and attested reign lengths) brings us to a date for Shoshenq I in the second half of the 9th century. This would place him a century later than the biblical Shishak, making the equation of the two untenable. Another candidate needs to be sought for the biblical ‘king Shishak’.